1. Field of the Invention
An object of the invention is an automatic system for the printing of an official form such as a medical prescription or health insurance refund form. It is aimed at simplifying the operations of transcribing the information elements needed for a medical form in order to make the written information elements more legible while at the same time limiting the risks of fraud.
2. Description of the Prior Art
At present, there is no device that enables the automatic printing of medical forms. It may be recalled that a form such as this must contain firstly the doctor's name as well as his or her references entitling him or her to practise medicine. Secondly, it should contain the patient's name, if possible his or her address and, as the case may be, even his or her identification number with a social insurance organization. There are known word processors that can be used to compose the text of a form. Once the text has been composed, it can be printed by a printer connected to a micro-computer that uses the word processor. However, an apparatus of this kind has the drawback of being relatively costly and bulky in a doctor's consulting room. Furthermore, the constraints related to entering the patient's references by keyboard are tedious, so much so that printed forms such as these are generally not used.
Another problem to be resolved is that of fraudulent behavior resulting from the theft of the forms or pre-printed prescriptions that doctors have at their disposal. Ill-intentioned persons can get hold of sets of prescription sheets such as these and draw up prescriptions for themselves in order to acquire prohibited medicines or obtain illicit refunding. A word processing system has little protection against such attempts, in view of the fact that fraudulent persons can use it to print out as many prescriptions as they wish.
An object of the invention is to overcome these drawbacks while, at the same time, proposing a system that is far more ergonomic and far simpler and furthermore has all the requisite functions.